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T1585 Establish Accounts

Adversaries may create and cultivate accounts with services that can be used during targeting. Adversaries can create accounts that can be used to build a persona to further operations. Persona development consists of the development of public information, presence, history and appropriate affiliations. This development could be applied to social media, website, or other publicly available information that could be referenced and scrutinized for legitimacy over the course of an operation using that persona or identity.12

For operations incorporating social engineering, the utilization of an online persona may be important. These personas may be fictitious or impersonate real people. The persona may exist on a single site or across multiple sites (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, GitHub, Docker Hub, etc.). Establishing a persona may require development of additional documentation to make them seem real. This could include filling out profile information, developing social networks, or incorporating photos.12

Establishing accounts can also include the creation of accounts with email providers, which may be directly leveraged for Phishing for Information or Phishing.3

Item Value
ID T1585
Sub-techniques T1585.001, T1585.002, T1585.003
Tactics TA0042
Platforms PRE
Version 1.2
Created 01 October 2020
Last Modified 16 October 2021

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0025 APT17 APT17 has created and cultivated profile pages in Microsoft TechNet. To make profile pages appear more legitimate, APT17 has created biographical sections and posted in forum threads.6
G0117 Fox Kitten Fox Kitten has created KeyBase accounts to communicate with ransomware victims.45

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1056 Pre-compromise This technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on behaviors performed outside of the scope of enterprise defenses and controls.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0029 Network Traffic Network Traffic Content
DS0021 Persona Social Media

References

  1. Lennon, M. (2014, May 29). Iranian Hackers Targeted US Officials in Elaborate Social Media Attack Operation. Retrieved March 1, 2017. ↩↩

  2. Ryan, T. (2010). “Getting In Bed with Robin Sage.”. Retrieved March 6, 2017. ↩↩

  3. Mandiant. (n.d.). APT1 Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units. Retrieved July 18, 2016. ↩

  4. ClearSky. (2020, December 17). Pay2Key Ransomware – A New Campaign by Fox Kitten. Retrieved December 21, 2020. ↩

  5. Check Point. (2020, November 6). Ransomware Alert: Pay2Key. Retrieved January 4, 2021. ↩

  6. FireEye Labs/FireEye Threat Intelligence. (2015, May 14). Hiding in Plain Sight: FireEye and Microsoft Expose Obfuscation Tactic. Retrieved January 22, 2016. ↩